Saturday in Central Georgia

Yesterday was an interesting day. It began in utter seriousness. I sat at the computer and wrote on my blog. I was describing the selfishness of the denizens of this house and how they struggle for control. In the midst of that, Cindy came out of the bedroom and demanded my attention. I finally ended up out in the back yard, working in the garden. Sullenly, I worked a hoe and the garden carrier and we put out mulch on the back garden until we ran out of mulch and newspaper. By the time we finished it was around 10:00 and we were already physically tired.

Cindy and I drank iced tea and lemonade, an Arnold Palmer, and I finally got Kate out of bed. After running a few errands and completing a few tasks around the house, we started taking showers in preparation for travelling to Columbus. After about an hour and a half, we were all ready.

We left in Cindy's car. Kate drove. As we pulled out of Griffin, heading down toward Zebulon, we had the same usual struggle with the radio/cd player in the car. If this weren't so ponderously repetitive, it might be funny. What ends up getting played on the stereo in the car ends up being the ultimate struggle between the generations, the sexes, the spouses, etc. We argue the points as we drive toward our goal. No one ever wins. Ultimately, the issue becomes moot when someone gives up or Kate goes to her ipod or the stereo is turned off for awhile.

The journey to Columbus went fast as Kate blitzed down the country roads, the sound of The Phantom of the Opera jarring my brain. The only crack in the seamlessness of the journey occurred as we passed through Zebulon and Cindy saw an old yard chair in the yard of a garden store and wanted Kate to stop. The size and design of the city of Zebulon is such that if you pass something by you might as well go on because there is no place to easily turn around and return to the place you began. But Kate found a road off the square where she could alter the route back to the garden store and we made our way back to the yard chair. Kate parked in a tiny parking space off a former tennis court behind an abandoned building and Cindy got her to leave the car and check out the yard chair.

Kate exited the Ford Explorer and walked over to the outdoor exhibit of yard goodies. A few minutes later, she returned to tell us that there was no sign of life at the store and that there didn't seem to be any price tag on the chair. So she started the car up and began backing out of the parking space into the narrow alley upon which she had travelled to the parking space. As she backed up, seemingly oblivious to her surrounding, I glanced back and notice a huge ditch right behind the rear wheels of the Explorer. I yelled at Kate, who immediately took offense that her daddy would call into question her awareness of the hole behind us.

But we finally returned to our journey. As the Phantom and Christine blared out of the stereo, Cindy and Kate sang along or argued about whether or not this particular song or that one was actually part of the original score or who was the best Phantom or who played Christine and where she was from. Meanwhile, I sat in the back with tinted reading glasses on and read a book about the settling of the American West. All this occuring while we hurtled through the countryside of Pike County, Georgia. As the Grateful Dead might sing,"What a long, strange trip its been."

As we drove, Cindy bemoaned the fact that she had no mascara and wondered if we would be able to find an Eckards or CVS pharmacy somewhere in Columbus. She had previously asked me to find out whether there was a Macy's in Columbus, which there was. As we drove past convenience stores and gas stations and video rental stores and nothingness, we finally made it into Columbus/Muscogee County. I actually did notice an Eckard's off to the left of the as we blitzed down the freeway into Columbus proper, but I noticed too late to take advantage of the sighting. We finally came to the Mall and made our way around to the end where Macy's is situated.

Parking the Explorer in the back of the mall, on the side which slams into the Columbus Airport, we walked across the hot pavement into Macy's. Cindy had noticed when we got into Columbus that the outside temperature as shown on our car thermometer was registering 99 degrees. Cindy wondered if we could handle a baseball game in such heat. As we walked across the lot into the store, I took note of a growing set of black clouds on the western horizon over toward Phenix City, Alabama and beyond.

We entered the store through the children's section of the store. As we walked into and through the lady's department, looking for cosmetics, Cindy groused about the size of the store. And I admit it was tiny compared to the stores at Perimeter or Lennox in Atlanta. But we found the cosmetics department and they didn't have what Cindy wanted, or at least, they didn't have what she wanted, packaged in the manner in which she wanted it to be sold. Nevertheless, as we walked back toward the kid's shop to leave the building, Cindy left Kate and me among the women's bathing suits to go wandering through the Ladie's Department. After realizing that she wasn't coming back anytime soon, Kate and I went exploring through the Ladies' Department to find her. As it turned out, she was trying on several articles of clothing, three or four of which she ended up buying.

That having been accomplished, and I am skipping parts, we let Kate try on several dresses and then headed back toward the shoe department and the restrooms in the corner of the store with gift wrapping to let Cindy use the facilities before we left. As Kate and I waited for Cindy to emerge from the lounge area in the corner of the store, Kate looked at shoes. Cindy then returned and the two of them started trying on shoes and discussing the various merits of the shoes they found.

Women get into this groove when they try on shoes. Their eyes glaze over and they shrewdly stare at their feet through the tiny mirrors placed conveniently near the floor and look at their feet in the particular shoe they are contemplating. It is quite comical to an outsider; it looks so serious. And there are so many styles and colors and designs of women's shoes. And as far as I can tell, there hasn't been a pair of women's shoes that was worth the price of the shoes. They all look cheap and insignificantly made. There is no rhyme or reason! Only the mania created by want. This may be the most significant difference between men and women in modern American life.

After much negotiating between mother and daughter and an extracted time in which the clerk couldn't manipulate the cash register/computer at the checkout area, we finally left with four pairs of women's shoes and $175 less in Cindy's checking account.

Finally, we made our way back to the car and left the mall. There was a lot less time to drive around Columbus on our way to Country's barbecue at this point, and we still had to find Cindy some tums and mascara. We drove around downtown Columbus and never found an Eckards or CVS pharmacy anywhere. We passed several hospitals, a lot of commercial area, both new and old. Still no Eckards or CVS. We finally took one of the downtown bridges over to Phenix City, Alabama on the off chance that they might have a national chain pharmacy. Hopes springs eternal! The closest we found was a small strip shopping center with a Piggly Wiggly and a Dollar General Store. Kate parked the car in a space which looked like it was designed for miniature cars and Kate and I walked across the busy parking lot and into the Piggly Wiggly.

I love Piggly Wigglys. They are always a throwback to at least the 1960's, and sometimes seem to transport you back to pre-World War II 1940. We walked through the store, being watched by everyone in the store, as we were definitely strangers to this Piggly Wiggly, until Kate found a roll of Tums and I found a package of toilet paper, something I knew we needed at home. I bought the items from a cashier who seemed to be ignoring us at the beginning, and then went back to Cindy in the car.

No mascara, but Cindy decided that we should look in the Dollar General Store, so we drove down to that end of the strip shopping center and Cindy and Kate went in the store. Several minutes later, they came out of the store with a little plastic bag and Cindy handing a dollar to a young girl at the entrance to the store. Strange, but apparently the girl was selling doughnuts for some youth organization or group, and Cindy paid her for some doughnuts without actually buying the doughnuts. The things travelling through Alabama cause you to do.

By the time we got to the barbecue restaurant it looked as if the place was almost closed. But they were, in fact, open and the waitress seated us at a booth which appeared as if a table full of toddlers had eaten there before us, the table itself being covered up with refuse, and the seats in the booth and the floor underneath being covered with bits and pieces of trash and discarded food.

I gingerly slid over the seat to the inside of same, careful not to touch much of the floor with my feet, as if I could get the dirty floor onto my feet through my shoes. Nevertheless, we looked over the menu and ordered iced teas. They finally brought us our food and Cindy, Kate and I ate heartily while the restaurant filled up with odd groups of people. Truly amazing. Do these people look at us and think we are as strange as they do to us? I wonder.

After finishing all of my meal and the last of Kate's meal and Cindy's meal, Cindy and Kate shared a mason jar of banana pudding for dessert, while I sipped on a straw in a sweet tea to go. I finally paid and we left the restaurant. Getting back in the car, we drove through downtown Columbus and around the river walk along the Chattahoochee River toward the ball park near the end of the riverwalk. We drove through the historic district, full of restored old homes and brick streets and made our way to the back of Golden Park, the home of the Columbus Catfish, a single A minor league baseball team.

As we parked the car and walked generally toward the park, Cindy wanted to take a look at the river behind the ballpark, so we took a detour over toward the riverwalk. This accomplished, we walked back toward the park to find that this was Support Our Troops Night at the baseball park and a good-sized contingent of the 82nd Airborne was congregating around the front of the ballpark to enter the park as a group. As we watched them march up to the back of the baseball park, we found we had to walk back past them all to the entrance of the ballpark and get back to the end of the line to get tickets. Fortunately, as we walked in the grass past the soldiers, the national anthem began blaring from the loud speakers at the park and the soldiers had to stop everything and stand at attention. After waiting for the anthem to end, we had a break in the line and could maneuver our way to the ticket sellers at the right field corner of the ballpark.

That having been accomplished, we made our way to our seats on the third base side of the ballpark, to find, not only that our seats were on the first row of the box seats along the third base line of the ballpark but were being taken up by some free loaders. So we scooted them out of the seats and sat down to find ourselves in the comedian section of the ballpark, right next to the visitor's dugout. For the rest of the evening, we sat and watched the game from a premium spot in the ballpark and listened to our seatmates razz the visiting team from our nearby perch. The steady flow of comments coming from our section only became more and more interesting as the night wore on and the amount of beer consumed by our seatmates began to mount up and breeze through their creative minds.

Unfortunately, the home team lost, but it was basically a fun night. We exited the park and made our way back to the car. As we left the riverfront and drove down toward the center of the old section of the city, we got thoroughly turned around several times and seemed to find our way up and down the waterfront several times until we finally worked our way out of the downtown womb in progress, there being construction and construction warning signs everywhere downtown.

After making our way out of the City of Columbus and Muscogee County and through Harris and Meriwether and Pike Counties and having had to change drivers because of the occurence of a bird slamming unexpectedly into our windshield and a racoon darting and running unexpectedly across the road in front of us, we finally made it home. Having cleaned up the mess the dog made during ten hours of confinement, we finally went to bed.

All in all a good day.